THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH

This masterpiece is unsurpassed, perhaps unequaled, among Poe’s very short stories. The author made few
revisions, but they show supreme artistry. Critics have differed widely in interpreting [page 668:] the tale,* but I see in it a clear moral that one cannot run
away from responsibility.

The plot involves the supernatural, but the chief incidents are historical. During the epidemic of cholera at Paris in
1832, people were determined to make what might be a short life a merry one, and many balls were given. The following description comes
from the sixteenth letter of “Pencillings by the Way” of N. P. Willis:

At a masque ball at the Théatre des Varietés. . . at the celebration of the
Mi-Careme, or half-lent . . . were some two thousand people . . . in fancy dresses . . . and
one man, immensely tall, dressed as a personification of the Cholera itself, with skeleton armor, bloodshot eyes, and other
horrible appurtenances of a walking pestilence.

This was first printed in the New-York Mirror, June 2, 1832, and there can be little doubt that Poe was familiar
with it. In his eighteenth letter Willis observed that there had been “two cases within the palace-walls.”† Since the letters of Willis were so well known in Poe’s day, it is needless to seek other sources
for the terrifying costume.

Poe’s setting for his tale recalls that of Boccaccio’s Decameron, where the narrators are members of
a group of people who retire to a remote castle to avoid the plague.‡ Prince
Prospero’s name is Italian, and Poe had another Italian source. In Graham’s Magazine for September 1841, he had
reviewed Thomas Campbell’s Life of Petrarch, and presumably saw there a grim story of a nobleman named Barnabo, who during
a plague shut himself up in his castle and set a sentinel to ring a bell if anyone approached. Yet a party entered unannounced, and
Barnabo, finding the sentry dead, fled [page 669:] to the forest where, it was
reported, he too died. In his review, Poe cites as inappropriately humorous Campbell’s sentence, “This was a dance of the
king of terrors over the earth, and a very rapid one.”§

Poe also may have read of the clock at Strasbourg Cathedral, where, shortly before the stroke of the clock, a figure
representing Death emerged from the center and sounded the full hour, while at the quarter and half hours the statue of Christ came out,
repelling the destroyer.*

The Red Death is imaginary; its name parallels the medieval Black Death of 1348-1349, and the “blue Plague”
of Shelley’s Revolt of Islam, X, xx-xxvi,† but it also reminds one a little
of the first plague of the Egyptians described in Exodus.

Other analogues have been pointed out which are more remote, or unlikely to have been known to Poe. There is a legend
of a ghostly skeleton dancing at the wedding feast of Alexander III of Scotland, at Jedburgh Castle in 1285.‡ Masquerades gave an advantage to assassins. King Gustav III of Sweden was killed at a masqued ball in
1792 — the basis of Verdi’s opera Un Ballo in Maschera (1859). The eleventh chapter of J. K. B. Eichendorff’s
Ahnung und Gegenwart (1815) is “Die Maskenball,” but I think it most improbable that Poe “may have
perused”§ that German romance. [page 670:]

Poe presumably composed “The Masque of the Red Death” about March 1842.

The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been{a} so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar{b} and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood.(1) There were
sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding{c} at the pores, with
dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the
aid and from the sympathy of his fellowmen. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half
an hour.

But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.(2)
When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights
and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and
magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This
wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought [page 671:] furnaces
and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair{d} or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such
precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to
grieve,{e} or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure.
There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians,{f} there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”

It was toward{g} the close of the fifth or sixth month of his
seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked
ball of the most unusual magnificence.

It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven
— an imperial suite. In many palaces, however, such suites form a long and straight vista, while the folding doors slide back
nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is scarcely impeded. Here the case was very different; as might
have been expected from the duke’s love of the bizarre. The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision
embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect. To
the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the
windings of the suite. These windows were of stained glass whose color varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations
of the chamber into which it opened. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example,{h} in blue — and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and
tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and
lighted{i}[page 672:] with orange — the fifth with white — the sixth with violet.
The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in
heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the
decorations. The panes here were scarlet — a deep blood color. Now in no one of the seven apartments was there any lamp or
candelabrum, amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro or depended from the roof. There was no light of any
kind emanating from lamp or candle within the suite of chambers. But in the corridors that followed the suite, there stood, opposite to
each window, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire{j} that projected its rays
through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room. And thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances. But
in the western or black chamber the effect of the fire-light that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes, was
ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the company bold
enough to set foot within its precincts at all.(3)

It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum
swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the{k} minute-hand
made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came{l} from
the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis
that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of{m} the orchestra were constrained
to pause, momentarily,{n} in their performance, to harken to the sound; and thus
the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions;(4) and there was a brief disconcert of
the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and{o} the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if [page 673:] in confused revery or meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter
at once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked at each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and folly, and made
whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then, after the
lapse of sixty minutes, (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies,)(5) there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then{p}
were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before.

But, in spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent revel. The tastes of the duke were peculiar. He had a fine
eye for colors and effects. He disregarded the decora of mere fashion.(6) His
plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre. There are some who would have thought him mad. His followers
felt that he was not. It was necessary to hear and see and touch him to be sure that he was not.

He had directed, in great part, the moveable embellishments of the seven chambers, upon occasion of this great
fête;{q} and it was his own guiding taste which had given character
to the{r} masqueraders. Be sure they were grotesque. There were much glare and
glitter and piquancy and phantasm — much of what has been since seen in “Hernani.”(7) There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the
madman fashions. There were{s} much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of
the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.(8) To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams.(9) And these — the dreams — writhed in and about, taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild
music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the
velvet. And then, for a moment,{t} all is still, and all is silent save the voice
of the clock. The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die away — they have endured but an instant
— and a light, half-subdued [page 674:] laughter floats after them as they
depart. And now again the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many
tinted windows through which stream the rays from the tripods. But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven, there are now
none of the maskers who venture; for the night is waning away; and there flows a ruddier light through the blood-colored panes; and the
blackness of the sable drapery appals; and to him whose foot falls upon the sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a
muffled peal more solemnly{u} emphatic than any which reaches their ears
who indulge in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments.

But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the revel went
whirlingly on, until at length {vv}there commenced the sounding of midnight{vv} upon{w} the clock. And
then the music ceased, as I have told; and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things
as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps,{x} that more of thought crept, with more of time, into the meditations of the thoughtful among
those who revelled. And thus, too,{y} it happened, perhaps, that before the last
echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware
of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumor of this new presence
having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of{z} disapprobation and surprise — then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of
disgust.

In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have
excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade license of the night was nearly [page 675:] unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod,(10) and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince’s indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts of
the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there
are{a} matters of which no jest can be{b} made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger
neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The
mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have
had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the
mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood — and his broad brow, with
all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.

When the eyes of{c} Prince Prospero fell upon this spectral image
(which with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role,{d} stalked{e} to and fro among the waltzers)(11) he was seen to be convulsed, in the first moment with a strong shudder either of terror or
distaste; but, in the next, his brow reddened with rage.

“Who dares?” he demanded hoarsely of the {ff}courtiers who stood near{ff} him — “who dares {gg}insult us with this blasphemous mockery?{gg}{hh}Seize him and unmask him{hh} — that we may know whom we have to hang{i} at sunrise, from the
battlements!”{j}

It was in the eastern or blue chamber in which stood the Prince Prospero as he uttered these words. They rang
throughout the seven rooms loudly and clearly — for the prince was a bold and robust man, and the music had became hushed at the
waving of his hand. [page 676:]

It was in the blue room where stood the prince, with a group of pale courtiers by his side. At first, as he spoke,
there was a slight rushing movement of this group in the direction of the intruder, who{k} at the moment was also near at hand, and now, with deliberate and stately step, made closer approach to the speaker. But from
a certain nameless awe with which the mad assumptions of the mummer had inspired the whole party, there were found none who put forth
hand to seize him; so that, unimpeded, he passed within a yard of the prince’s person; and, while the vast assembly, as if with
one impulse, shrank from the centres of the rooms to the walls, he made his way uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn and measured
step which had distinguished him from the first, through the blue chamber to the purple — through the purple to the green —
through the green to the orange — through this again to the white — and even thence to the violet, ere a decided movement
had been made to arrest him. It was then, however, that the Prince Prospero, maddening with rage and the shame of his own momentary
cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the six chambers, while none followed him on account of a deadly terror that had seized upon all. He
bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached, in rapid impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the
latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly{l}
and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry — and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly
afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once
threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of
the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpselike mask which they handled with so violent a
rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night.(12) And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died [page 677:] each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony
clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held
illimitable dominion over all.(13)

VARIANTS

[The following variants appear at the bottom of page 670:]

Title: The Mask of the Red Death. A Fantasy. (A); The Mask of
the Red Death. (PHANTASY-PIECES)

NOTES

1. Compare Exodus 7:19-21, “Take thy rod, and stretch out thine hand
upon the waters of Egypt . . . that they may become blood . . . and all the waters that were in the river were
turned to blood . . . and there was blood throughout all the land of Egypt.” Virginia Poe had burst a blood vessel in
singing during January 1842, and even this may have influenced her husband’s description, as William Bittner, Poe (1962),
p. 177, thinks. One of my students had a greatgrandparent who saw Mrs. Clemm take Virginia into the Fordham cottage after blood had
gushed from her mouth.

2. Prince Prospero, like his namesake in The Tempest, fled from the
world, but ironically Poe’s prince ceased to prosper.

3. There is little doubt that the rooms have poetic meanings; many readers
find that the possibility of seeing little more than one room at a time symbolizes man’s inability to see the future, or recapture
the past. The colors seem to be significant. My student Emily Crandall observed that the absence of yellow is notable. Blue is the color
of morning and beginnings, black of night and endings. The rest seem different to different readers. Professor Walter Blair, in
Modern Philology, May 1944, argued for the seven ages of man, and thought the last room like a coffin. My students have also
seen the seven days of the week, the seven deadly sins, and even seven parts of a day. Note also that blue and red are the poles of a
compass — the beginning and the end.

4. The waltz was still considered somewhat risqué in 1842, but Poe
himself probably danced it with Mary Andre Phelps. See Woodberry Life (1909), II, 272, citing her reminiscences.

5. The simple enumeration of the seconds in an hour is supremely effective
here.

6. Prospero shares his contempt for fashionable decora as well as
his interest in richness of decoration with the hero of “The Assignation.”

7.Hernani (1830) is a play by Victor Hugo, on which Verdi later
based an opera. It was much discussed and quite evidently made an impression on Poe. See Politian and my note (Mabbott, I, 297).
[The details of Poe’s use of Hernani as a source are worked out by B. Pollin in his Discoveries in Poe (1971),
chapter I.]

8. N. P. Willis, in the seventeenth letter of “Pencillings by the
Way” — see his Prose Works (1845), p. 28 — describes several Parisian fancy balls (both with [page 678:] and without masks), each full of a variety of costumes, ranging from the graceful
and beautiful to the grotesque and absurd.

9. Compare The Tempest, IV, i, 156, “We are such stuff as
dreams are made on.”

10. To “out-Herod Herod,” from Hamlet, III, ii. 16, is
a favorite phrase with Poe, also used in “Metzengerstein” and “William Wilson.”

12. The phrase “like a thief in the night” may be found in Sir
Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, Part I, section 46. Compare I Thessalonians, 5:2.

13. The rhymes in the last sentence are, of course, intentional. In the
last line, comparison has been made to Pope’s verse “And universal darkness buries all.” It certainly may have
contributed to the power and finality of Poe’s conclusion. See Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (1958), p. 150, where he
says, “The closing note, echoed from the pseudo-Miltonic last line of Pope’s Dunciad, predicates a reduction of
cosmos to chaos: ‘And darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.’ ”

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 668:]

* See, for example, the papers listed in J. P. Roppolo’s “Meaning and
‘The Masque of the Red Death’ ” in Tulane Studies in English, vol. 13, for 1963. [See also, for both
interpretation and suggestion of sources, Robert Regan’s essay cited in n. 19 on “William Wilson.”]

† See The Prose Works of N. P. Willis (1845), pp. 24 and 30. Poe had
used the horrendous costumes of masqueraders in “King Pest,” written in 1834 or 1835. An account of the ball in the Paris
Constitutional, March 31, 1832, was cited by Eugène Sue. See C. P. Cambiare, Influence of . . . Poe in
France (1927), p. 282.

‡ Killis Campbell, Mind of Poe, p. 171, picks up a suggestion of W. D.
Armes in the Transactions of the American Philological Association (1907) that Poe’s source was in William Harrison
Ainsworth’s Old St. Paul’s. This turns out to be merely an account of a London grocer who, during the Great Plague of
1665, stocks his house with supplies and keeps his family at home. Poe disliked Ainsworth, never mentioned that book of his, and must
not be supposed wholly unacquainted with so important a work as the Decameron.

[The following variants appear at the bottom of page 669:]

§ The direct quotation is from Thomas Campbell’s Life of Petrarch
(Philadelphia, 1841), p. 211. J. B. Reece, discussing this source in Modern Language Notes, February 1953, points out that
Campbell offers a motive for revelry during the epidemic in “the general persuasion that sadness accelerated the infection of the
malady, and that pleasant amusements were the surest defense against it” Reece comments, “ ‘Poetic’
justice, for which Poe had respect, is much better served in the story by the omission of any reference to the motive which Campbell
attributes to the pleasure seekers, as is the over-all tone of horror which Poe wanted to achieve.”

* I use Wilhelm Ruland, Legends of the Rhine (Cologne, 1906), pp. 63, 64, but
the clock is famous.

‡ John H. Ingram tells this in Haunted Homes of Great Britain (Second
Series, 1884), p. 184, but gives his source as Thomas Heywood’s Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels (1635).

§ See Franz Karl Mohr in Modern Language Quarterly, March 1949, and
Haldeen Braddy, Glorious Incense, p. 44. Poe never mentioned Eichendorff, and could read little German. For other suggestions see
C. K. Holsapple in University of Texas Studies in English, July 8, 1938; Richard Cary in Nineteenth Century Fiction, June
1962: and Gerald E. Gerber in American Literature, March 1965. [B. R. Pollin, in Studies in Short Fiction, Fall 1968, and
in Discoveries in Poe, pp. 80-90, adds further suggestions.]